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Watson
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Watson is an AI system designed to answer natural language questions. It trounced the human competition in a special edition of Jeopardy!, and its first real-world application will involve healthcare data.
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Did You Know?
The minimum system requirements needed to run Watson involve a server that costs $1 million. |
In early 2011, Watson beat the world's top Jeopardy! champions. |
Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson. |
Watson takes up more space than eight large refrigerators. |
David Ferrucci, who led the Watson project, has said that a big inspiration was the Star Trek computer. |
Specs
- FEATURES
- Architecture based on embarrassingly parallel computations. Capable of performing 80 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second).
- HEIGHT
- 200 cm | 78.7 in (approximate)
- LENGTH
- 291.9 cm | 114.9 in
- WIDTH
- 285.5 cm | 112.4 in
- WEIGHT
- 7500 kg | 16534 lb (approximate)
- SPEED
- N/A km/h | N/A mph
- SENSORS
- N/A
- ACTUATORS
- N/A
- POWER
- External power supply
- COMPUTING
- 90 clustered IBM Power 750 servers housed in 10 refrigerator-size racks with I/O nodes and communications hubs. Total of 2,880 POWER7 processor cores, 16 TB of RAM, and 21.6 TB of storage.
- SOFTWARE
- Watson is powered by the DeepQA (Deep Question Answering) analytics software developed by IBM Research. DeepQA is largely written in Java. Other important components are in C/C++ and Prolog. All components work with Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), which provides the middleware framework for both interoperability and scalability. Watson uses IBM Java for Power systems, the LanguageWare tokenizer from IBM Content Analytics, the ESG parser from IBM Research, and Case Restoration analytics from IBM Research. Other open source analytics used in DeepQA include Indri and Apache Lucene text-search components and the Sesame RDF schema-based repository and querying facility. Hadoop is also used as part of the technology tool kit for generating runtime data sets. For software development the DeepQA research team uses Eclipse and Rational tools.
- DEGREES OF FREEDOM (DOF)
- N/A
- MATERIALS
- Lots of silicon and metal.
- COST
- N/A
- STATUS
- Ongoing
- WEBSITE
- http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html
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